Contributing to GeoNode

Warning

This section is freely adapted from the official GitHub guides.

If you are interested in helping us to make GeoNode, there are many ways to do so.

Participate in the Discussion

GeoNode has a mailing list (http://geonode.org/communication/#mailing-lists) where users can ask and answer questions about the software. There are also IRC chats on Gitter where users (https://gitter.im/GeoNode/general) and developers (https://gitter.im/GeoNode) can discuss GeoNode in real time. Sometimes users also post interesting tips for managing sites running GeoNode. If you want to help out with GeoNode, one easy way is to sign up for the mailing list and help answer questions.

Report Problems on the Issue Tracking System

Informative bug reports are a key part of the bug fixing process, so if you do run into a problem with GeoNode, please don’t hesitate to report it on our bug tracker, available online at https://github.com/GeoNode/geonode/issues. Useful information for bug reports includes:

  • What were you doing when the bug occurred? Does the problem occur every time you do that, or only occasionally?
  • What were you expecting to happen? What happened instead?
  • What version of the software are you using? Please also note any changes from the default configuration.
  • If there is a data file involved in the bug (such as a Shapefile that doesn’t render properly), please consider including it in the bug report. Be aware that not all data files are freely distributable.

To help GeoNode address the issue, you can tag the ticket with one or more labels that you can find on the side column.

Write Documentation

GeoNode’s documentation can always use improvement - there are always more questions to be answered. For managing contributions to the manual, GeoNode uses a process similar to that used for managing the code itself. The documentation is generated from source files in the docs/ directory within the GeoNode source repository. See http://www.sphinx-doc.org for more information on the documentation system GeoNode uses.

If you want to learn more about contributing to the documentation, please go ahead to the “How to contribute to GeoNode’s Documentation”. GeoNode also have some guidelines to help with writing once you are set up “How to write Documentation”.

Provide Translations

If GeoNode doesn’t provide a user interface in your native language, consider contributing a new translation. To get started here are the instructions “How to contribute to GeoNode’s Translation”.

Write Code

Of course since GeoNode is an open source project which encourages contributions of source code as well. If you are interested in making small changes, you can find an open ticket on https://github.com/GeoNode/geonode/issues, hack away, and get started on the “Patch Review Process”.